The Association of Family Medicine Residency Directors is midway through a year of strategic response to the Future of Family Medicine report. Our member directors are providing “Leadership for the Future of Family Medicine” consistent with our 2004–2005 theme in many ways. At more than 400 residencies throughout the United States, residency curricula will be retooling for the strategic implications of family medicine’s current position and its future potential.
What can we anticipate in the current decade for family medicine residencies? The Future of Family Medicine report itemizes a target of electronic health records in all family medicine residencies by 2006. Today, about one third of our residencies use them, one third are “shopping,” and one third are catching up while learning from the experience of others. Information technology can provide the ingredients toward greater knowledge about the effectiveness of our patient care and about aggregate outcomes.
In this decade, health care expenditures in the United States will exceed $2 trillion annually. Will the United States experience $2 trillion of value-added benefit from these expenditures annually? What are the system-based competencies for residents in training that address the stewardship of these expenditures? What are the most value-delivering reforms for funding graduate medical education? How will we prepare our graduates to practice treatment and prevention in a health care un-system simultaneously described as awesome and awful?
The Institute of Medicine (IOM) provides some guidance for a future toward which we can prepare our graduates. From the To Err is Human report,1 we understand that tens of thousands die of health care problems. From Crossing the Quality Chasm2 we hear that health care is so broken, we must redesign it and then replace it. From the Academic Health Centers report3 we recall that “health professions training is a major factor in creating the culture and attitudes that will guide a lifetime of practice.”
By referring to these publications as guideposts, family medicine and its residencies can address each of these issues in the coming years. We can strengthen our training in quality and safety to benefit our patients and their families while demonstrating our outcomes for all of health care. We can lead reform of health care stewardship and delivery. We can influence professional training through the vast reach of our training sites and the interdisciplinary nature of our professional culture.
The Association of Family Medicine Residency Directors is dedicated to promoting excellence in family medicine graduate education to meet the health care needs of the American public. We are active in pursuit of this mission and eager for the American public to experience its benefits.
- © 2005 Annals of Family Medicine, Inc.
